18 The Economist November 6th 2021
BriefingSocial mobility in America
I
n the 1940s Joseph Biden senior fell
from early wealth to neardestitution. He
moved his young family in with his in
laws as he scrabbled for work in Scranton,
Pennsylvania, before reestablishing mid
dleclass ease as a usedcar salesman in
Delaware. For all the weight that his son,
President Joe Biden, places on the well
being of the middle classhe also cares
deeply about the opportunity to join it, or
rejoin it, and to rise through its ranks.
The president’s personal story chimes
with something his country sorely needs:
increased social mobility. Addressing the
essence of his “Build Back Better” series of
bills, originally pitched as a $4trn package
over ten years but now being haggled over
in Congress at half that level of spending,
Mr Biden has said it lies in providing peo
ple “a fair chance to build a decent, middle
class life to succeed and thrive, instead of
just hanging on by their fingernails.”
If his administration has a signal
achievement to date, it is the expanded
childtax credits in the American RescuePlan (arp), the stimulus package which
was passed in March. They appear to have
reduced child poverty by more than 25%
since they went into effect in July.
The president’s camp sees helping the
disadvantaged as a way to boost the econ
omy as a whole. Janet Yellen, the treasury
secretary, argued that the plans would
“support families and enable greater inclu
sion in the workforce and social mobility—
helping the disadvantaged and boosting
economic growth”. Cecilia Rouse, the chair
of the president’s Council of Economic Ad
visors, put it plainly in an interview with
The Economist: “Most would agree that our
current rates of social mobility are too low.
There is not equality of opportunity. Kids
are not starting at the same place.”
Data show that to be inarguable. Ameri
ca, the avowed land of opportunity, now
appears a harder place in which to make it
than Canada or western Europe, and this is
a fundamental flaw in its economy and
society. Ameliorating this through public
spending is possible, if exceedingly difficult. And, for Mr Biden, the opportunity to
do so is coming to an end.
The idea that social and economic sta
tus should be conferred according to effort
rather than hereditary privilege was long
seen as quintessentially American. In the
1830s Alexis de Tocqueville commended
the “continual movement which agitates a
democratic community”, arguing that it
stabilised democracy.
Karl Marx remarked that America’s po
tential for class consciousness was sadly
limited because “though classes, indeed,
already exist, they have not yet become
fixed, but continually change and inter
change their elements.” The country’s so
cial and economic mobility was only really
accessible to white men—AfricanAmeri
cans and women of all colours would have
to endure much longer before the Ameri
can Dream could be theirs, too. But the
dream was still there.A runaway American Dream
Today, however, it is receding. What econ
omists call absolute mobility—the proba
bility that a child will grow up to earn more
than their parents—has dropped precipi
tously. In a paper published in 2016, enti
tled “The fading American Dream”, a team
of social scientists found that Americans
born in the 1940s had a 90% chance of
earning more than their parents had
earned at the age of 30; for those born in
the 1980s, the chance of that had droppedWASHINGTON, DC
The social-spending package that Democrats are agonising over is not grand
enough to repair the American DreamStuck in place